Tag Archives: moon

The International Space Station is seen in silhouette as it transits the moon at roughly five miles per second, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2015, Woodford, VA. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

It’s not often you get given the opportunity to travel, live in an exciting new city and get an incredible internship all in one. So when I heard about the Erasmus+ Programme I applied right away! I wanted to gain more experience in remote sensing.

When I was little I had a very big poster of the moon surface hung on my wall, it had so much detail and I would stare at it every night before I went to bed. After my parents bought my first computer, I started to search for more images of the moon and other planets and I was impressed by the complexity of what I found. This was the beginning of my fascination with remote sensing. When it came to choosing my career path, it was not hard. I knew what I wanted to become and now it sounds, and feels, right to call myself a Geomatics Engineer.

Iâ€™m currently studying two undergraduate degrees in Surveying, and Civil Engineering; but it was still hard to find an Erasmus work placement for remote sensing. I managed to find the Pixalytics Ltd with my teacher’s help, as he had previously met Dr Samantha Lavender.

After finding a place to do your internship the rest is should be easy, but not for United Kingdom. Getting my work permit from British Council was a really challenging process, and took me exactly three months. Despite doing everything right, getting responses to my emails for sponsorship was hard. It was the most awful part of the process for me, because there was nothing I could do except wait. Finally, after a lot of patience my visa arrived and I was on my way to Plymouth!

The last issue, and some peopleâ€™s main concern, is getting accommodation. I did not find it hard to find a place to stay because most of the students were out of town. With a basic search on the internet I found a flat in four days, it is based a few hundred metres from the centre of Plymouth and close to the bus route to Pixalytics.

I thought I had read and traveled enough to be prepared when I stepped off the plane in London, but it was still a shock standing alone with my suitcase and hearing all the British accents around me. At first, it was difficult to adapt to the language as the accents are sometimes hard to understand. But once Iâ€™d grasped the pronunciation, I believe Iâ€™m improving every week.

Working at Pixalytics will be my first internship experience, and I am so grateful to Samantha Lavender for giving me this opportunity. Working abroad will be a memory and lesson in itself but I hope to also I hope to enhance my discipline and knowledge as well as applying my existing engineering and personal skills.

Getting my internship was a long, difficult and exhausting process, but I realized that it’s totally worth it as soon as I got to Plymouth, If anyone is thinking of applying to the Erasmus+ programme, I would totally recommend it!